NewsBlur has always been great at reading feeds. But finding new ones? That was mostly on you. The old “Add Site” dialog was a search box and not much else. If you already had a feed URL, it worked fine. If you were looking for something new to read, you were on your own.

The new Add + Discover Sites page changes that. It’s a full-page discovery experience with eight tabs covering YouTube channels, Reddit communities, podcasts, newsletters, Google News topics, trending sites, popular feeds, and of course the classic search-and-subscribe workflow. There are over 50,000 curated feeds to browse, all organized into dozens of categories and subcategories.

Eight ways to find feeds

The tab bar across the top gives you eight different lenses into the world of RSS:

• Search — The classic search bar, now with semantic search and autocomplete. Type a topic or URL and get instant suggestions. Below the search results you’ll find trending feeds ranked by a hybrid algorithm that combines subscription velocity, read engagement, and subscriber counts.

• Web Feed — Create RSS feeds from any website. This one gets its own blog post.

• Popular Sites — Thousands of curated RSS feeds organized into categories like Technology, Science, News, and Business. Each category has subcategories for drilling down further.

• YouTube — Over 2,000 verified YouTube channels converted to RSS feeds. Browse by category or search for specific channels. Subscribe and read YouTube in your feed reader the way it should be.

• Reddit — Nearly 6,000 real subreddits across 47 categories. From r/programming to r/sourdough, you can subscribe to any subreddit as an RSS feed.

• Newsletters — Newsletters from Substack, Medium, Ghost, Beehiiv, and other platforms. Platform pills let you filter by newsletter provider if you have a preference.

• Podcasts — Popular podcasts organized by genre. Search for shows or browse the curated collection.

• Google News — Eight preset topics (World, Business, Technology, Sports, and more) that create feeds from Google News. One click to subscribe.

Categories and subcategories

Most tabs are organized with a two-level taxonomy. Click a category pill at the top to filter, then drill into subcategories for more specific browsing. YouTube’s Technology category, for example, breaks down into Programming, AI & Machine Learning, Gadgets, and more.

The categories are consistent across tabs where it makes sense, so you can explore Technology feeds across YouTube, Reddit, Popular Sites, and Podcasts without having to rethink the navigation each time.

Grid view and list view

Every tab supports two viewing modes. Grid view shows feed cards with thumbnails, descriptions, subscriber counts, and freshness indicators. List view compresses things into a denser layout when you want to scan quickly.

A style popover in the top right lets you toggle between views. Your preference is saved per tab.

Try before you subscribe

Every feed card has a Try button that instantly fetches the feed and shows you the actual stories. No commitment, no subscribing. Just a quick look at what you’d get. If you like what you see, the subscribe button is right there with a folder picker.

A breadcrumb link at the top takes you back to where you were browsing when you’re done previewing.

The new Add Site popover

If you don’t need the full discovery page, the popover that appears when you click “+” in the sidebar has been redesigned too. It still has the quick URL input for when you have a feed address handy, but now it also shows freshness indicators and has buttons to jump into any of the discovery tabs.

Semantic search

The search tab uses Elasticsearch to find feeds by name with fuzzy matching. Type “cooking” and you’ll get cooking blogs, YouTube cooking channels, cooking subreddits, and cooking podcasts. It searches across all feed types, not just traditional RSS. If Elasticsearch doesn’t find anything, the search falls back to a database query so you’ll always get results.

Where all these feeds came from

Building the discovery page meant curating a lot of feeds. I wrote management commands to discover and verify channels, subreddits, podcasts, and newsletters from real sources. The collection includes over 2,000 YouTube channels, 6,600 subreddits, 7,300 newsletters, 32,000 podcasts, and 14,000 RSS feeds. Over 63,000 feeds in total, all real, verified, and categorized.

The Add + Discover Sites page is available now on the web for all users. If you have feedback or ideas for new categories, platforms, or features, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.

A lot of the sites I subscribe to have audio and video embedded directly in the stories. Podcasts, YouTube channels, news clips. But playing them in NewsBlur has always been a bit awkward: you hit play on the native browser control, then if you scroll to the next story or switch feeds, the audio just stops. I wanted something that keeps playing while you keep reading.

So I built a persistent mini media player. It sits at the bottom of your screen and handles audio, video, and YouTube from any story. Play something and it stays with you as you navigate feeds, open folders, or scroll through stories.

How it works

When you open a story that contains audio, video, or a YouTube embed, you’ll see overlay buttons right on the media element: Play in Mini Media Player, Play Next, and Play Last. Click any of them and the mini player appears at the bottom of the screen. If you click the native play button on an audio or video element, it hands off to the mini player automatically.

The player has a three-row layout. The top row shows the feed favicon, feed name, and story title (click the title to scroll back to the story). The middle row is a full-width scrubber so you can seek precisely. The bottom row has playback controls: skip back, play/pause, skip forward, a time display, playback speed, and a volume slider that appears on hover.

Build a queue

The real power is the queue. As you’re reading through stories, you can add media to your queue with “Play Next” (inserts at the top) or “Play Last” (appends to the end). The queue shows up right below the player with a count of upcoming items. Drag items to reorder them, or remove items you’ve changed your mind about. When the current item finishes, the next one starts automatically.

Playback history

Switch from the “Up Next” tab to the “History” tab to see your last 10 played items. Each entry shows where you left off, so you can pick up a podcast episode right where you stopped. Click any history item to resume it.

Settings

Click the gear icon in the player to customize your experience:

• Skip back/forward: Choose how far to jump (5s, 10s, 15s, 30s, or 60s in each direction)
• Auto-play: Automatically play the next queued item when the current one finishes (on by default)
• Resume position: Remember where you left off in each episode (on by default)
• Show on load: Restore the player when you reload NewsBlur, so you can pick up right where you left off (on by default)

Synced across reloads

Your playback state, queue, history, and settings are all saved to your NewsBlur account. Reload the page and the player comes back with your queue intact and the current episode paused where you left it. Position data syncs in real time via WebSocket so there’s no lag.

Playback speed

Click the speed indicator (next to the time display) to cycle through speeds: 0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, and 3x. Your speed preference is saved and applied to the next item in your queue automatically.

The mini media player is available now on the web for all NewsBlur users. If you have feedback or ideas for how to make it better, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.